Re: Newbie: How do I defrag my drive?

[Tim Ruehsen <tim.ruehsen@gmx.de>]

> You don't need to.  You only need to defragment your disk if your
> operating system is incapable of keeping the fragmentation under
> control, and Linux does not suffer from this problem.

Many people say so, but it is not true.

Ext2 takes some precautions to reduce fragmentation a bit (in comparison with 
(V)FAT), but ext2 can't prevent it. And it is not a feature of 'Linux' it is 
a feature of the filesystem.

Jiann-Ming Su posted a link, which talks about two possibilities to defragment 
your discs: either use defrag (but make a backup before!) or just make a 
backup, clean your partitions and restore the backup.

I did the last thing (after using my system for ~2 years for ~10 hours a day, 
making updates every day) and my system booted about 30% faster. Now, after a 
year or so, it seems to be time to do it again (booting became slower and 
slower).

Regards, Tim